Read In

Egypt suffers from an astonishing amount of automobile-related
pollution, traffic, and parking problems.
Egyptian entrepreneurs have been innovating
their way out of the traffic problem for a while now, and
Hayk Hakobyan is joining their ranks. His scheme is different,
though, in that it uses sharing to solve one of Egypt's most
complicated problems.

Hakobyan is one of three cofounders of KarTag, a newly launched social
carpooling mobile app available for iOS and Android devices.
Through the app, users can offer rides to their Facebook community
in their own cars, setting the price and itinerary themselves with
no interference from KarTag, says Hakobyan. “Our app facilitates
matchmaking between those who have a car with those who need a
ride. This is all being done among Facebook friends, friends of
friends, and colleagues / students from the same company,
university, or area,” he says.

“We believe that everyone should have access to affordable and
reliable transport, and that being on the road can still be cheap,
green, and fun,” Hakobyan adds, explaining KarTag’s mission.

Hakobyan is an Armenian national. Years ago, he moved to
Switzerland to study nuclear physics, but has lived in Egypt for
the last four years, working on tech-related initiatives.

Launched in May 2013, KarTag joins a long list of carpooling
apps in the Middle East region in general, and Egypt in particular.
Services such as Waselny in
Jordan, and Egypt
Carpoolers and NerkabSawa (among many
others) in Egypt, have been struggling to persuade users to adopt
the concept of carpooling. With a different take on social
carpooling, KarTag aims to bridge the culturally driven tendency to
mistrust such services.

“The concept of the sharing economy is relatively new [to the
region], and while Arab people have always shared things and
services with each other inside their cultures, the technology that
allows and facilitates this [new] sort of sharing is still new in
this region,” Hakobyan.

KarTag is still trying to reach to potential customers, although
the app has been downloaded 1,000 times on Google Play since its
launch last May, and slightly less than 1,000 times on the App
Store. Hakobyan tells Wamda they are currently forging partnerships
with universities (Heliopolis University is on board at press
time), multinational corporations and organizations, as well as
with other apps related to transportation and traffic such
as sharemyfare.com in Turkey,
and Wasalny in
Egypt.

KarTag will need to deal with another well-established
competitor, PieRide,
a company that also allows people traveling to and from the same
area (university students, work colleagues, etc.) to share a car or
bus driven by a professional driver. Hakobyan seems quite sure his
venture is different: "While KarTag is a social,
community-based carpooling service, PieRide is more a mixture of a
subscription-based taxi and carsharing." He's careful to mention,
though, that their overally missions are the same: "However
different, both startups aim to alleviate increasing traffic levels
in Cairo."

Evading the standard business model of carpooling services,
KarTag is free to use for users, “We generate revenues by offering
white label versions of our app to big companies, MNCs,
organizations,” Hakobyan elaborates their business model. “Our
charges are based on their size, number of employees, and
modification of the app they would like to have.”

KarTag’s team plans to expand the service in the near future, to
include “other value-added services in the coming version.” They
are also looking to expand geographically, first in the MENA
region, and then Asian, African, and Eastern European markets.
“We’ve had feedback that this specific type of carpooling app –
which actually solves the trust issues through Facebook – needs to
be deployed in Asian countries, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, as
well as former Soviet republics,” Hakobyan says.

English Managing Editor Stephanie d'Arc Taylor contributed
to this report.